In electrical or electronic systems, various individual system modules, for instance various electronic/electric assemblies, various electronic/electric components, for instance various semi-conductor components such as integrated circuits, etc., various sub-components, provided in one and the same component or integrated circuit etc., communicate via a transfer medium such as a bus system.
A bus system may comprise one or more transfer lines. Bus systems can be used jointly by several, in particular by two or more than two modules/components/elements of a respective system.
Many conventional bus systems comprise several partial systems, for example, a data bus, consisting of one or more data lines, and/or an address bus consisting of one or more address lines, and/or a control bus consisting of one or more control lines, etc.
In comparison to this, other bus systems are of a much simpler construction. For example, a so-called IBCB bus (IBCB=Inter Block Communication Bus) in general merely comprises two transmission lines to connect two respective modules/components/elements.
Further examples for relatively simple bus systems are CAN busses (CAN=Controller Area Network), which generally only comprise two or three lines (e.g., CAN_HIGH, CAN_LOW, and optionally, CAN_GND (ground)), LIN busses (LIN=Local Interconnect Network), which generally comprise only one single transmission line, etc.
In many conventional systems, for instance, in systems with an IBCB bus, various modules/components/elements may be connected in a chain-like structure. For instance, a first component may be connected via two IBCB transmission lines to a second component, the second component may be connected via two IBCB transmission lines to a third component, the third component may be connected via two IBCB transmission lines to a fourth component, etc. Hence, e.g., a logical “1” (or correspondingly, a logical “0”) may first be transmitted from the first component to the second component in the above chain of components, then from the second component to the third component, then from the third component to the fourth component, etc.
In addition, a central microprocessor or microcontroller may be provided, which, e.g., may be connected with the first (or last) component in the above chain of components, e.g., via SPI (SPI=Serial Peripheral Interface), or any other suitable connection.
However, in case of an error, respective error data must be transmitted to the above microprocessor or microcontroller, and/or, e.g., a main control device.
For this purpose, in conventional systems, separate transmission lines may be provided that directly connect a respective component with the above central microprocessor or microcontroller and/or the above main control device. In this case, however, additional cables have to be provided.
For these or other reasons there is a need for improved systems and methods to transmit data, in particular error data over a bus system.